NewTek’s LightWave 3D Group have released the Kinect supported NevronMotion which is a motion retargeting plugin for their world famous Lightwave 3D modelling and animation software along with the latest version of LightWave itself which is 11.6 and is the version required for NevronMotion. More details in the trailer above and the following description from their website, press release and SIGGRAPH 2013 demo:

About NevronMotion

NevronMotion is a motion retargeting plugin for LightWave 3D with support for the Microsoft Kinect camera. NevronMotion allows you to load common motion capture files in FBX or BVH format and easily retarget the motion onto your character directly in LightWave Layout. You can quickly adjust any of the character rig joints in areas like the shoulders or arms to compensate for any joint placement inaccuracies and bake out your final animation directly to your character rig.

NevronMotion also comes with rig retargeting presets for FBX and BVH files and allows you to fully customize your rig retargeting and save your own retargeting presets that you can load later to use with custom motion capture libraries. You setup the rig retargeting mapping once, save the preset and then you can reuse that over and over.

NevronMotion also includes a rig preset that works directly with the Microsoft Kinect camera to allow you to puppet a character rig in real time and even record your real time Kinect motion capture performances to save to your library for later use.

NevronMotion greatly simplifies the motion capture workflow in LightWave 3D and allows you to get character motions or create your own motions with the Kinect Camera to get your characters moving quickly and easily.

Press Release

The LightWave 3D Group Announces LightWave 11.6 and NevronMotion Plugin Software Now Available Worldwide

Powerful new features in LightWave 11.6 software streamline previsualization, production and 3D printing for artists and designers; NevronMotion plug-in for the Microsoft Kinect camera captures and retargets motion in LightWave 11.6 for character animation and real-time puppeteering.

Burbank, California (PRWEB) November 01, 2013

The LightWave 3D® Group, a division of NewTek, Inc., today announced the final release of LightWave 11.6 software for 3D modeling, animation, and rendering is now available worldwide. Also announced today is the final release of the NevronMotion plug-in for LightWave 11.6, which uses the Microsoft Kinect camera to capture motion in real time for retargeting to 3D or live-performance characters. NevronMotion also simplifies retargeting data from standard motion capture files directly into the LightWave interface.

Created by artists for artists, LightWave 11.6 introduces many new ways for 3D artists and designers to model, animate, capture, retarget, and input and output to 3D. New features allow users to:

Animate in New Ways: With the Spline Control tool, nulls or other objects act as nodes in a spline to control or deform objects such as tentacles, tails, whips or even elevators; Raycast Motion utilizes raycasting technology to make an animated object aware of its surroundings;, and the Compound Node feature can simplify complex networks down to a single node.

Streamline Real-Time Virtual Production, Pre-Viz, and Game Development: Use NVIDIA CgFX shader technology to create 3D assets for virtual production, pre-visualization, or game development and view assets within LightWave OpenGL exactly as they will appear in the final real-time display engine. Users can also place Normal Maps on 3D objects to make lower-polygon objects or characters display as higher-resolution objects, and create custom CgFX shaders or use existing CgFX shaders.

Output to 3D Printers: LightWave Modeler now includes new import and export options to support the popular STL and PLY file formats. VRML is also supported and offers surface color data for 3D color printing of objects with texture maps. Also included is full control of the export format used, whether in ASCII or binary, the up direction, and units for export. New geometry clean up tools specifically for 3D printing output are also included.

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